VENEZUELA: People’s Poet

“I’m just a poet on loan to politics,” said Venezuela’s new Foreign Minister Andres Eloy Blanco. “I’m not a foreign Minister, but I will try to make myself one.”

In appointing 51-year-old Poet Blanco, Venezuela’s Novelist-President Rómulo Gallegos knew that he had laid his hand on a man who had the confidence of Venezuela’s common people. Blanco, an unassuming little man with sunken cheeks and burning eyes, is their country’s foremost poet and orator. The fact that he presided last week over the Foreign Office in the Casa Amarilla in Caracas was a sort of personal triumph for them.

Blanco has spent more than half his life fighting dictatorship. He began writing poetry at 14, at 27 won a 25,000-peseta ($3,250) award from the Royal Spanish Academy. Long before that, he was deep in the revolutionary movement against Dictator Juan Vicente Gómez.

Prison Verses. In 1928, Blanco started the anti-Gomez weekly El Impartial, soon made it the most influential paper in Caracas. In due time a copy fell into Tyrant Gómez’s hands and Editor Blanco went to jail, spent four years in grillos (leg irons). “I witnessed tortures that were incredible,” he said. “I saw them sentence one man to 1,000 lashings and saw him die after 300.”

In prison, Blanco poured out verse. His jailers gave him no paper because they knew the power of his pen; he scratched his verses on prison walls, memorized what he had written. His poems were carried outside the walls to become part of the people’s lore.

Both in & out of jail, Blanco has endeared himself to his people with his songs and coplas—short four-line verses on popular themes. A Caraqueño recalls: “Late one night about five years ago, we were sitting in a beer garden, drinking and listening to an urchin singing. A man wandered in from the street and sat down with us. For the urchin’s song, he improvised a copla, and the boy tried to make one up, too. Then the man improvised verse after verse for an hour—about each of us, about the beer garden, about the weather, about the country. As he left, the ragamuffin said reverently: ‘That was Andrés Eloy Blanco.'”

Political Talk. Since Gómez died and left Venezuela free to fight its way toward democracy, Blanco has been a sort of moderator and conciliator among political factions. He is without a politician’s ruthlessness, and although he has been president of the now-dominant Acción Democrática party, he has little sympathy for the business of machine politics. Last year, as president of the Constituent Assembly where Venezuela’s new democratic constitution was written, his calm reasonableness headed off many a crisis.

As Foreign Minister, Poet Blanco defends the intellectual in politics. “There is no separation between literature and the people,” says he. “It is necessary that intellectuals serve.” He intends to set an example.